OLD TESTAMENT SURVEY Lesson 11 Joseph-Moses: Archaeology and Egypt Part 2 When I was young we often played a game called “Clue.” Clue is a logical deduction game where clues unfold helping you determine who committed the murder, which weapon was used, and where the murder was committed. “Colonel Mustard did it with a candlestick in the study” might be the answer. Or perhaps it was Professor Plum. As you assemble the clues, you are in a race to deduce the solution before the other players. The race can sometimes make you guess the answer without all the support you need to have certainty. In other words, you might have narrowed down the possibility to two of the potential six perpetrators, or maybe know that four of the six possible weapons are eliminated from consideration, leaving a potential of two options. Of the nine rooms you may not always know the actual one involved at the time you hazard a guess to the solution. The practical effect of the game was that guessing before a final solution was clear always left the possibility of guessing wrong, even though you were able to eliminate 90 percent of the options. In the real world, it is rarely as simple as the game of Clue. So when we consider Israel’s exodus from Egypt, we ask questions like: • Who was Pharaoh when Joseph went to Egypt? • Who was the Pharaoh of the exodus? • When did the exodus occur? We have clues to these questions, both in the Bible and from archaeological findings, but we do not have definitive answers. The clues give indications for reasonable opinions, but they are not so definitive that the conclusions are certain and beyond any dispute. In the first part of this lesson (two weeks ago) we analyzed the archaeological arguments lodged against the belief in an authentic exodus as given in Scripture. The analysis was not too different than what I would use in a court cross- examining experts on their opinions. This class shifts the focus from the arguments against the truth of Scripture, to those archaeological finds that support the accounts in Scripture of Israel’s time in Egypt and the exodus into the Promised Land. www.Biblical-literacy.com Copyright 2010 by W. Mark Lanier. Permission hereby granted to reprint this document in its entirety without change, with reference given, and not for financial profit. We should first readily acknowledge, I am not a trained Egyptologist. I have read a number of books, enough to know that I cannot in a clear conscience claim to have “the answers” to the questions posed above. That said, I have also read enough to help me form some opinions about those questions! So our approach will be to analyze a number of factors that coincide with my opinion. We do so, however, recognizing that other opinions carry their own sets of supports. Our encouragement is for the interested reader to seek out the many informative books on this subject and consider them in whatever depth is desired. THE CHRONOLOGY We should first set out the timelines relevant for our discussions. Egyptologists divide the history of Ancient Egypt into a number of divisions.1 If we narrow these divisions down to those that involved ruling dynasties, we begin around 3000 BC. They seem easier to follow in bullet form: • Early Dynastic Period (c.3000 - 2686 BC). During this time there were two dynasties (appropriately called the “First” and the “Second” Dynasties), each with a number of rulers. • Old Kingdom (2686 – 2160 BC) consisting of the Third through Eighth Dynasties. • First Intermediate Period (2160 – 2055 BC). This held the Ninth through Eleventh2 Dynasties. • Middle Kingdom (2055 – 1650 BC). The Eleventh through Fourteenth Dynasties were included in this time. • Second Intermediate Period (1650 – 1550 BC). This held the Fifteenth through Seventeenth Dynasties. The Fifteenth Dynasty was the “Hyksos” dynasty about which we will speak later in this lesson. • New Kingdom (1550 – 1069). This held the eighteenth Dynasty through the Twentieth Dynasty. Within this New Kingdom time was a sub- classification called the “Ramessid Period (1295 – 1069 BC) where the Rameses Pharaohs reigned in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties. This is important as we go through this lesson. 1 There are those who object to these classifications, and the dates are subject to different opinions. Still most references use these dates and we accordingly set them out here. The dates here are those given by Shaw, Ian, The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (Oxford 2000). 2 The Eleventh Dynasty was in Thebes only in this time period. During the next period, the “Middle Kingdom” the Eleventh Dynasty extended to all of Egypt. 2 • Third Intermediate Period (1069 – 664 BC) with the Twenty-first through the Twenty-fifth Dynasties. • Late Period (664 – 332 BC), which brought an end to the dynasties when the Persian Period brought down the Thirtieth Dynasty. In part one of this lesson we discussed the timing issue of what the Bible tells us about the date of the Exodus. In that lesson, we considered the implications of two different dating passages. The first was 1 Kings 6:1, which reads, In the four hundred and eightieth year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel … he began to build the house of the LORD. Since most scholars consider the Bible as placing the building of the temple as around 960 BC, that would place the exodus at 1440 BC, during the New Kingdom. The Pharaoh in 1440 was the Eighteenth Dynasty’s Thutmose III, who reigned from 1479 to 1425. Yet there are great difficulties in trying to place the exodus during the reign of Thutmose III. One notable difficulty lies in the explanation behind the slavery of Egypt found in Exodus 1:11, Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens. They built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Raamses. Raamses as a name and a ruler did not exist until the Nineteenth Dynasty (the start of the “Ramessid Period”) with Rameses I in 1295 BC. As we explained in part one, ancient near eastern writing conventions would often count a generation as forty years for computational purposes. So the twelve generations from the exodus to Solomon’s building would be 12 x 40 = 480 years. In that writing sense, the 480 years of 1 Kings 6:1 is precise—it gives the right number for the reader to understand the twelve generations. Yet if viewed from the perspective of the true number of years, we know that most would likely have children somewhere around age 20 to 25. If that figure is used, then the exodus would have occurred somewhere around 1260 BC, the reign of Rameses II (1279- 1213). Famed Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen uses this date and we urge those interested to read his more thorough treatment of his analysis, reasoning, and justification.3 3 Kitchen, K. A., On the Reliability of the Old Testament, (Eerdmans 2003) at 202f, 307ff. See also Hoffmeier, James, Israel in Egypt (Oxford 1996) at 125 and cites therein. 3 We will use the Rameses II era to consider archaeological factors in favor of the Biblical exodus account. We do so recognizing that many others set out other ideas and theories.4 ARCHAEOLOGICAL FACTORS5 We have previously discussed the absence of certain evidence on the presence of Israel in Egypt, as well as the lack of evidence of a large exodus. When we look back over the time period of Ancient Egypt, we see a glaring factor we must take into account as we scour the archaeological evidence and record: we are dealing with Egyptian history that spanned thousands of years. While that sentence may be easy to read over, we should take a moment and digest the implications. Archaeologists have only scratched the surface of some limited archaeological remains of events and peoples that occurred over an entire populated region/country in the world in a civilization that continued for thousands of years. To locate a certain individual or event is a bit akin to finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. This is especially true when later history showed the event to be of great importance, but the time considered it a humiliating defeat doubtlessly talked about little and certainly not desired to be memorialized or remembered. So we look for consistencies and try to understand inconsistencies, rather than hoping to find the exodus story engraved on the tomb wall of Pharaoh Rameses II! Here we set out a number of consistencies, giving cites for further study or explanation. We start first with the Joseph story before progressing to Moses and the Exodus. 4 By using this date, we will see in later lessons it places Israel’s conquering of Canaan in line with the dates many archaeologists favor for the destruction of certain key Canaanite cities. 5 As we get into these factors we should note a number of good resources available beyond those included in these footnotes. Oxford has published a large three volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (2001) edited by Penn State’s Egyptologist Donald Redford. Various experts wrote the entries including Kenneth Kitchen and James Hoffmeier. Both Kitchen and Hoffmeier have a number of relevant books and articles including Kitchen’s book noted in footnote 3 above. Kitchen has published many more relevant books including Pharaoh Triumphant, The Life and Times of Ramesses II, (Aris & Phillips, Ltd. 1982) and many articles including those on point in the Anchor Bible Dictionary (Doubleday 1992) on “Exodus”; Zondervan Pictorial Bible Encyclopedia (Zondervan 1976) on “Goshen,” “Hyksos,” “Pithom,” “Potiphar,” Raamses, Rameses (City),” and “Zoan”; International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Eerdmans 1982) on “Joseph” and “Shishak” as well as many other publications.